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a bit of bad fortune, to choose that particular song.
    I wish I’d gone with them to the Wren that first night. I was the only one in the band actually knew something about folk music. Ashton and Jon, they had more of a rock and roll background. They had no trouble picking up the songs and the instrumentation, but until we went to Wylding Hall, they’d never done anything in the way of research into old music. They’d just pick up whatever song was making the rounds and try to put a stamp on it.
    Julian was different. He had a better idea than anyone, even me, as to exactly what those songs were about and what they meant. But I wasn’t aware of that at the time.
    And Les is American. Today, she knows just as much about folk songs as I do, but back then she picked it up because that’s what you did—if you weren’t going to be in a rock and roll band, you’d sing folk songs. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, they all did riffs on English folk. Lesley had the voice for it. More soulful than someone like Grace Slick, and Les didn’t sound like she was giving you a lecture, the way Joan Baez did.
    Les had a magical voice. She was just starting to write her own songs, so she’d pretty much sing whatever you handed to her. I would never have expected her to recognize the photos in the Wren, but I might have thought that Ashton would mention them. He knew how caught up I was with folklore and ritual. Then again, maybe that’s why he didn’t mention them. Or maybe he was just too pissed to notice them.
    I went up to the pub by myself a few days later. I was in the mood for a walk, and sometimes it felt like such a pressure cooker at Wylding Hall. I could hear Julian and Lesley going at it in Julian’s room. Les, mostly: I never heard much out of Julian. He wasn’t what you called hot-blooded, not until the girl showed up.
    Still, him and Les were in the throes of an affair, even if it was mostly one-sided. Made me miss my girlfriend, Nancy. Jonno—well, I wasn’t sure what Jonno got up to. He didn’t tell the rest of us he was gay till that autumn. I’m pretty sure he told me some story about a girl back in Chelsea.
    But I missed Nancy terribly. Spent a lot of time feeling sorry for myself in my room, playing mournful songs.
    That particular day, I decided to really feel sorry for myself and tromped off to the pub. Took the better part of an hour to get there on foot, and I was thirsty when I arrived. Had a pint of good ale, sat off by myself. There were only a few geezers there, and they left me alone. Fine by me.
    After a while, I got a second pint and was starting on a third when I decided to take a slash. Heading back from the bog, I noticed several photos on the wall. Old photographs, black and white, cheap frames. The kind of thing you see in every pub in England—the local rugby team, or someone’s brother with the goalie from Manchester United, or the great granddad of the proprietor.
    But these were different. At first I thought they were very old, early nineteen hundreds, maybe even older. Because of the subject matter. All that time I spent at Cecil Sharp House, poring through their archives and old books—well, I recognized these photos. Not the exact photos, but the subject matter.
    They showed a group of boys in ragamuffin finery—old frockcoats too big for them, knee-high boots or soft leather shoes, top hats or workmen’s caps stuck with sprigs of ivy and evergreen. It was wintertime, a few inches of snow on the ground. One of the photos showed the boys knocking at the door of a cottage. In another, they stood all in a row, each of them holding what looked like a walking stick, and staring at the camera with that strange grim look you see in old photos. Like they’d been told, “Whatever you do, don’t smile .” The last photograph, they stood atop a little hill in a half-circle.
    You’re thinking, So what?
    Well, here’s the thing: in every photo, one boy held what looked like a cage